olable
representatives of the people had been arrested in their homes,
during the night, by order of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte.

II

MISSION OF THE REPRESENTATIVES

Those who, as representatives of the people, received, in trust for the
people, the oath of the 20th of December, 1848, those, especially who,
being twice invested with the confidence of the nation, had as
representatives heard that oath sworn, and as legislators had seen it
violated, had assumed, with their writ of summons, two duties. The
first of these was, on the day when that oath should be violated, to
rise in their places, to present their breasts to the enemy, without
calculating either his numbers or his strength, to shelter with their
bodies the sovereignty of the people and as a means to combat and cast
down the usurper, to grasp every sort of weapon, from the law found in
the code, to the paving stone that one picks up in the street. The
second duty was, after having accepted the combat and all its chances
to accept proscription and all its miseries, to stand eternally erect
before the traitor, his oath in their hands, to forget their personal
sufferings, their private sorrows, their families dispersed and
maltreated, their fortunes destroyed, their affections crushed, their
bleeding hearts; to forget themselves, and to feel thenceforth but a
single wound--the wound of France to cry aloud for justice; never to
suffer themselves to be appeased, never to relent, but to be
implacable; to seize the despicable perjurer, crowned though he were,
if not with the hand of the law, at least with the pincers of truth,
and to heat red-hot in the fire of history all the letters of his oath,
and brand them on his face.

He who writes these lines is one of those who did not shrink, on the
2nd of December, from the utmost effort to accomplish the first of
these two great duties; in publishing this book he performs the second.

III

NOTICE OF EXPIRATION OF TERM

It is time that the human conscience should awaken.

Ever since the 2nd of December, 1851, a successful ambush, a crime,
odious, repulsive, infamous, unprecedented, considering the age in
which it was committed, has triumphed and held sway, erecting itself
into a theory, pluming itself in the sunlight, making laws, issuing
decrees, taking society, religion, and the family under its protection,
holding out its hand to the kings of Europe, who accept it, and calling
them, "my brothe